And in the end, she directed her bottomless well of compassion at herself, at the young girl she’d been, at the soldier fighting for a righteous cause that she’d grown up to become, at whoever she was now, today, in this next stage of her evolution.

The sun crested the hills around her. Through closed eyelids she sensed it. On her brow she felt the warmth of its first morning rays.

She thought back to Mai, young Mai, magical Mai, impossibly perceptive and sweet Mai, who’d seen into the knot of hurt and self-recrimination deep inside of Sam, and somehow loosened it. Who’d allowed her to forgive her young self. She thought back to every moment of the short encounter they’d had, to the way Mai had wanted a sister, to the way Sam had pledged to be that sister for her, and how Mai had become Sam’s sister in return.

Tears flowed down her cheeks, warmed by the sun that now bathed her face completely. And as she brought up all the sorrow and joy and loss and hope of her brief time with Mai, she felt other minds open to her. Young minds. Otherworldly minds.

Then the gate was opening, and Samantha Cataranes was home at last.

Darkness

DARKNESS

Su-Yong Shu walked slowly through the tall grass studded with its yellow flowers. The sky above her was a stunning cobalt, peppered with small white clouds. In the distance, beyond the wide flower-dotted plain, majestic purple mountains reared into the air, crowned in snow as white as the simple dress she wore now. She walked barefoot, luxuriating in the feel of the grass as it brushed her legs, as her downstretched fingers stroked the tall stalks.

Su-Yong stopped, then crouched down, and plucked one of the flowers from its stem. She brought it close to her face, letting her senses drink in the sweet smell of it, the brilliant golden hue of it. She smiled, her face young and carefree, her hair long and dark and blowing in the wind like a girl’s.

Chrysanthemum boreale, this was. The “golden flower”. One of the Four Gentleman of Chinese lore. Her favorite flower, dating back to her sweet, innocent childhood.

She stared at the flower now. If she wished she could zoom her vision into it, penetrate into its internal structure, peel away mental layers, right down to an individual cell, then down further, into its eighteen diploid chromosomes, then further, to each of its individual genes and every nucleic acid base pair within them.

She didn’t. Instead, she let the flower take her back, back in time. The air before her parted, a wide rectangular swath of silver, ten times her height and twice as wide as it was tall. It sliced into being, interrupting the vast plain and its flowers, obscuring the mountains behind.